Scandals Should Rarely Matter

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In front of you are two buttons, and you must choose one. Here’s what they do:

Button 1: Grow the economy by an extra 1 percentage point next year. From a bird’s eye view, this doesn’t look like much. But on the ground, this will mean:
- McDonald’s deploys some enhanced, speedy grills faster than otherwise
- a pharma company cures an obscure disease affecting a few thousand people
- [a bunch of other changes I couldn’t list for a complete hypothetical if I tried to]
- the typical person (think median income) gains about $400

Button 2: You make sure that one guy who sexually assaulted a bunch of women is punished. If you don’t press this button, he goes free.

The guy in question clearly deserves punishment, and we’d hate to let him go. But if we press button 2, we forgo pressing button 1. The lives of most people would be slightly worse than otherwise, and for some people, their life will be much worse. The only downside of pressing button 1 in this hypothetical is that some asshole goes unpunished.

This is meant to be analogous to an election where your preferred candidate experiences some kind of scandal. Elections have huge consequences for society, and usually, a voter will vote for a candidate because they expect them to be better for society as a whole. Once you’ve judged that one candidate’s policies will be better for society than the other’s, the fact that they’ve done something seriously wrong is a drop in the bucket.

There are two major differences this analogy has with real life, beginning with the fact that button 2 usually comes with some other upsides. Candidates are rarely perfect matches for their voters. If you voted for the other candidate, you’d probably get policies you prefer in one or two areas. It’s not just that you would punish the offender by changing your vote.

The second, and perhaps more important difference, is that people might infer other negative qualities from the scandal. This is especially sensible if your preferred candidate experiences some kind of corruption scandal. Even if you prefer their policies, if they’re going to go behind everyone’s back and steal money from the public, that’s a significant downside. Any kind of scandal might also be taken as a signal that a candidate isn’t trustworthy to carry out their agenda. If the guy promising to put away the criminals is himself a criminal, is it reasonable to believe him?

For the most part, I don’t think these differences matter much in practice. Imagine it’s 2016 and you’re planning to vote for Donald Trump. You want tighter security at the border, lower taxes, and school choice—a system of vouchers where parents can shop in a competitive marketplace for better schooling. These issues are all very important to you, though you would prefer Clinton’s universal pre-K policy. Then October comes around and you’re listening to the Access Hollywood tapes where Trump talks about groping women:

Unknown: “She used to be great, she’s still very beautiful.”

Trump: “I moved on her actually. You know she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it. I did try and fuck her, she was married.”

Unknown: “That’s huge news there.”

Trump: “No, no, Nancy. No this was [inaudible] and I moved on her very heavily in fact I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture. I moved on her like a bitch. I couldn’t get there and she was married. Then all-of-a-sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”

[Billy] Bush: “Your girl’s hot as shit. In the purple.”

Multiple voices: “Whoah. Yes. Whoah.”

Bush: “Yes. The Donald has scored. Whoah my man.”

Trump: “Look at you. You are a pussy.”

Bush: “You gotta get the thumbs up.”

Trump: “Maybe it’s a different one.”

Bush: “It better not be the publicist. No, it’s, it’s her.”

Trump: “Yeah that’s her with the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Bush: “Whatever you want.”

Trump: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

This is viscerally disgusting, and yet anyone who preferred Trump’s platform to Clinton’s would be irrational to change their vote as a consequence. Does punishing someone for probable sexual assault matter more than the lives of hundreds of millions of people? Definitely not. Does this change whether you would expect Trump to do what he says he’s gonna do? Unlikely. On that note, sure, his promises were questionable in the first place (why would you believe his promise to grow the economy by 4%+ each year?), but since he’s a Republican, you could expect him to do the things you would expect any other Republican president to do. And indeed, he cooperated with Congress to provide a debt-financed tax cut for most Americans in his first year, even if his most important promises fizzled out. (And of course he was just kidding. What, you actually believed he was being serious when he promised [list of all of the things he didn’t do]?)

But this article isn’t just about Trump’s 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaigns. It’s also about Jay Jones, who won the race for Virginia attorney general yesterday. Here’s what he had to say in private text messages about the then-Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert, a Republican:

Jones: Three people, two bullets

Gilbert, hitler, and pol pot

Gilbert gets two bullets to the head

Coyner: Jay

Please stop

Jones: Lol

Ok, ok

This is an awful, awful thing to say, especially to Coyner, a Republican state delegate. But it isn’t of profound societal importance to punish a guy for saying (and presumably joking) that he’d rather shoot one of his political opponents twice than shoot Hitler and Pol Pot. His campaign website says he’ll prioritize getting “illegal guns” off the streets. If you believe him and you care about that, why would you trade that away just to avoid electing someone who says insensitively violent things?

I can still think of reasons why this scandal might matter. The state AG represents the state government in court and prosecutes people, and we might want them to behave in a way that’s impartial. But for the most part, I don’t think people seriously care about this—Miyares and Jones alike have made it clear they aren’t impartial and do have strong preferences between the two parties. That’s natural behavior in modern politics. Miyares’s website has a link to an article titled “Virginia AG Reveals Shocking Consequences of Democrats’ Soft-on-Crime Policies” explaining how Democratic policies result in thousands of extra crimes. Maybe we’re to believe Jones will, unlike Miyares, exclusively seek to protect Democratic constituents by prosecuting with discretion. This is a questionable conclusion to begin with, but it also seems like even more reason for a self-interested voter to maintain their support for Jones.

Whenever these scandals happen, we desperately hope there’s some way to punish the offender, and the only natural method that comes to mind is making sure they don’t win. And if someone barely prefers one candidate to the other, it would be reasonable for a scandal to influence their choice. But if voters were idealized, rational decision makers, we would rarely expect scandals to influence their behavior. We should be glad that this is often true.

Preview photo credit: PBS.